Matthew Scott

If you were looking for the archetype of a crank it would be Piers Corbyn. Rather like his long-forgotten younger brother, he has an unfortunate habit of consorting with people who hold very unpleasant views. So it was no surprise that the anti-lockdown demonstration he organised last Saturday was attended by a motley crowd, with enough misfits and weirdos to satisfy the most exacting Downing Street recruitment process. Among the attendees was David Icke, who believes the Royal Family are shape-shifting lizards and the Rothschilds are responsible for spreading coronavirus. They are not particularly easy people to like.

What is a suitable punishment for those who kill a policeman? For PC Andrew Harper's widow, Lissie, the sentences given to her husband's teenage killers – a maximum of 16 years – were woefully insufficient. Many agreed. And now Lissie Harper has started a petition calling for 'Harper's law'. Half a million people have signed up, demanding a change in the law to ensure those convicted of killing a police officer, firefighter, nurse, doctor, prison officer or paramedic are jailed for life. But while it is impossible not to feel horror at the way in which PC Harper was killed – entangled in a tow rope and dragged along a road for over a mile behind a car – as well as sympathy with his widow, 'Harper's Law' is a bad idea.

One of Julian Assange’s many gifts to the law was to establish in the case of Assange v. Swedish Judicial Authority that where a woman consents to sexual intercourse on condition that the man is wearing a condom, he commits the offence of rape – in English as well as Swedish law – if they then have intercourse without one. (Although whether this is actually what Mr Assange did will never be established as the Swedish authorities discontinued the prosecution last November). In 2013, judges went a step further and decided that a man who obtained consent by promising to practise ‘coitus interruptus’ was guilty of rape if he harboured a secret intention to break his promise.

In 1739 a London attorney called John Theobald fell into a dispute with a man called John Drinkwater, widely regarded as ‘the most litigious Fellow in London’. Theobald met with Drinkwater’s enemies in a Holbourn tavern, and they decided ‘the Way to perplex Drinkwater and bring him to Terms, was to indict him for Barretry – the offence of bringing vexatious lawsuits. On Theobald’s complaint Drinkwater was indicted and taken to a debtors’ prison. But the jury acquitted him on every count. Drinkwater then in turn indicted Theobald on 15 counts of barratry, with the same result: Theobald was acquitted, with the jury, not for the last time in legal history, demonstrating more common sense than the lawyers.

Jolyon Maugham QC got up early on Boxing Day morning, put on his wife’s satin kimono, went into his garden and bludgeoned a fox to death with a baseball bat. He then announced what he had done on Twitter. There is no mystery about why he killed the fox. It had come to eat his chickens, which he keeps in his central London garden. It became trapped in the chicken-netting. Rather than try to disentangle it or call the RSPCA, he killed it with the baseball bat that he keeps at home, mainly to deter intruders. I doubt that he relished the task of killing the fox, and he tweeted, again infelicitously, that he “did not especially enjoy killing it.” It is quite possible that he acted in the heat of the moment and from the most compassionate of motives.

Victims Commissioner Vera Baird says the 'double jeopardy' rule – which prevents a person being tried for the same offence twice – should not apply in certain cases to those acquitted of less serious crimes against children. This is a big mistake. It would make Britain's rules on double jeopardy – a legal principle established for thousands of years – among the most feeble in the West. Demands for cracking down on 'criminals' are easy to make. They are also politically popular. Boris Johnson has realised this with his calls for longer sentences for criminals. After all, tougher treatment of those accused of sexual crime are among the few things that unite the traditional Conservative 'law’n’order' right and the 'woke' left.

Jeremy Corbyn, Shami Chakrabarti and Harriet Harman all have difficulties with the idea of complainants in rape cases being asked to hand over their mobile phones as part of a police investigation. Corbyn has described it as a 'disturbing move'. It is nothing of the sort. No change in the law has taken place. Instead, rightly stung by a series of recent cases in which evidence from mobile phones suggesting innocence was withheld from the defence until the last minute, the National Police Chiefs Council and the Crown Prosecution Service have agreed on a standard form to give to complainants when investigating sexual offences.

Speaking on the radio this morning, the Foreign Secretary refused the temptation to condemn the Legal Aid Authority's grant of legal aid to Shamima Begum. He was right to do so. We give legal aid to those accused of murder and genocide. This is not because we have sympathy with murderers and genocidal killers but because it is overwhelmingly in the public interest that criminal trials are fair, and that people are punished only when their guilt has been fairly established in accordance with the law. Once a crime passes a certain level of seriousness, legal aid for those without the means to pay is automatic. It would be absurd if it were denied to those accused of the most serious offences, or against whom there was particularly strong evidence.

This week the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, decided not to allow Shamima Begum to return to this country, stripping her of her British citizenship and arguing that she is instead the responsibility of Bangladesh. His decision to do so has not been universally popular, but others have argued that the UK should not go easy on the young Isis bride. Brendan O'Neill, in an article for the Spectator, said he has 'been worried about the moral compass of the chattering classes for a while now... But even I have been taken aback by the sympathy for Begum. It points to a complete unanchoring of sections of the opinion-forming set from any sense of morality.' He said that Begum should not have her citizenship removed.

The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his 'scales of justice' speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith's magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched at shoulder height and say: ‘It may appear that the scales of justice are first weighed on one side in favour of the prisoner and then on the other against the prisoner. As counsel on either side puts the evidence in the scales, I can call to my fancy a great statue of Justice holding the two scales with equally honest hands.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Ministry of Justice endured amongst the deepest cuts of any government department. Yet even as over £2 billion was saved by closing courts, cutting legal aid and allowing prisons to become dangerous, rat-infested, spice-ridden hell-holes, the Ministry of Justice was powering ahead with a £1 billion plan to 'digitise' the court system. Unlike the cockroaches crawling along the prison landings it sounded slick and modern, and to some extent it was successful. Most criminal case 'papers' are now accessible electronically, a considerable convenience to all concerned, though advocates usually prefer – at their own expense - to print out hard copies for use in court.